Hosting Enterprise Applications Locally

1

What do you think will be a strong motivating factor for hosting your applications locally in Nigeria?

  1. Cost
  2. High Availability
  3. 24/7 Knowledgeable Support
  4. Low Latency
  5. Others ?
1 Like
2

Number 6. Do you have light?

8 Likes
3

Cost(should include cost of power generation) I believe is number 1 factor and others like security

4

In this case, ‘light’ is a given. At the very least most standard ISP in Nigeria today are able to guarantee 99.9% power uptime.

5

Please can you explain how ‘Cost’ is a motivating factor? I thought it’d be more of a disincentive.

6

I would go with high availability (99.99% to be precise). I believe this covers the area of “light” and issue of cybersecurity.

7

7 - Government Legislation.

8

How is this a consideration? What kind of legislation will make you want to host your applications with a Nigerian hosting company as opposed to hosting it abroad?

9

It could be an incentive if the cost of hosting in Nigeria is much lower than the cost of hosting overseas. I will give you a hypothetical example. If a US hosting service is $5 and a Nigerian hosting company is also charging you $5 (equivalent in naira) for the same specs of VPS cloud instance, which would you go for and why?

10

This has been happening in Kenya for years, although not without some startup drama. Anyone remember the Angani debacle? It’s original founders moved on to create Node Africa to do essentially the same business.

https://nodeafrica.com

11

1, 2, 3 & 4

Local or not, the first 4 should be compulsory parts of any offering.

12

Speaking from personal experience (as a founder at Node Africa) there are many incentives to host locally (giving my experience in Kenya) - cost - total cost of ownership of the application is the primary motivator. It is cheaper, for our customers to host some applications in country (especially transfer heavy applications) because of data egress and ingress charges. In Kenya, for instance, we have a requirement that all data for banks should be within Kenya - so that means the banks can’t use cloud infrastructure that isn’t resident in the country. The government is also pushing for all their data to be hosted within the country. This does seed a niche industry that can grow significantly. For many enterprises, moving to the cloud requires a private>hybrid>public cloud approach and for many of them they can’t start in most of the global providers because of the prohibitive data transfer charges (imagine an application with a few ten gigs of data growth daily). A cloud provider within the country who allows them unmetered bandwidth metering allows them to use the in country infrastructure while at the same time making better use of their infrastructure. Generally, local loop connectivity is cheaper than the transfer charges. The use cases are numerous and the market is huge (especially for enterprises). We’re currently serving customers from different continents who all want to serve an African audience, so the demand exists.

5 Likes
13

Got it. I actually misinterpreted “locally”. I thought you meant the equipment is owned and managed by the company in-house. (I’m slow like that)

14

Oh… I just updated my post to be more explicit.

15

This is so true. And you can see this clearly if you have ever tinkered in the infrastructure or ISP domain.

16

Just seeing this post.

We have also enjoyed in-country experience after migrating to a Nigerian host(MainOne). They power most ISPs with their Submarine Cable from Lisbon with Tier 3 DC.

So, the speed of response of our application is 10x compare to outside the country.